A NATION CHALLENGED: OBJECTS

A NATION CHALLENGED: OBJECTS; Medic, Out of the Rubble, Finds an Identity Restored

By JIM DWYER

Published: November 6, 2001

When he finally woke up that morning, all the e-mail messages told him something awful had happened: We can't believe it, Hope you're O.K., Our hearts are with you. On the answering machine, he found a message from his sister. She loved him and figured he was down there, helping.

Actually, he had been moping.

In his closet, he found a paramedic sweatshirt and a badge he had not used for years, remnants of a treasured time he had squandered. He went to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center and hitched rides on ambulances. Maybe he would do splints or bandaging.

Downtown, instead of patients, he found a world stalled by fresh catastrophes every minute. Fires raged, more buildings were collapsing, and no one could search, much less rescue.

At dusk, the first hopeful shout rose from the pile.

Two men, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin of the Port Authority Police Department, were buried a good 20 feet below ground, almost at the exact center of the 16-acre complex. Of all the thousands who were missing, they would be the last two people pulled alive from the ruins.

When emergency service officers dropped into the hole, they saw the man in the blue paramedic sweatshirt already there, tending to Officer Jimeno.

For hours, they worked elbow to elbow in a tiny space, heaving concrete blocks an inch, sawing rebar, shoveling with their hands. Yet no one knew anything about the man in the blue shirt, who never stopped digging or left his patient's side until Officer Jimeno had been hoisted from the rubble and into an ambulance.

''A medic named Chuck, that was all,'' said Scott Strauss, one of the emergency services unit officers in the hole. ''He was great. None of us had ever met him before and we never saw him again.''

Last week, Charles Sereika read an account in The New York Times of the rescue that featured a pair of $20 handcuffs the officers had used to dig. He was Chuck the paramedic.

''I think people in my family doubted it,'' Mr. Sereika said. ''It was hard for me to believe. I was there. I left. I was alone. It was like I was a ghost.''

On his journey to that terrible hole, Mr. Sereika traveled a much greater distance than his ambulance ride from Midtown.

For years, Mr. Sereika, 32, has struggled with alcoholism, a problem that has cost him jobs and friends and has resulted in a few nights in jail. He let his paramedic card lapse. Six months ago, his family packed him off to a rehabilitation program called Sierra Tucson in Arizona. He returned to New York in July, sober, and went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day.

Mr. Sereika got in touch with the newspaper in hopes of reaching Officer Jimeno, whom he last saw being passed across the rubble by firefighters and other rescue workers. He had no interest, Mr. Sereika said, in appearing in the press as a hero.

''I don't fit the mold,'' he said. Later, after discussing the matter with his family and his therapist, he decided that he should be open about who he is and what he did.

''Keeping secrets is going to kill me,'' Mr. Sereika said. ''In May, I was down and out. Before that I hadn't drunk in about a year, but I wasn't going to meetings. By May, I was consumed by alcohol, and an eating disorder. I had too much shame about my relapse to come out of it myself.'' His family booked flights to the rehabilitation program, and he canceled them every day for two weeks before finally going.

When he returned, he felt whole, even though he knew that an important part of his life had slipped through his fingers. Until two years ago, he worked as a paramedic in the metropolitan area. He helped manage his family's real estate holdings in the city, and piled up minutes of sobriety until they became months.

On the evening of Sept. 11, almost nothing good was happening at the site of the attack, with most rescue attempts confined to the fringes, except for the one that led to the discovery of Officer Jimeno and Sergeant McLoughlin.

David Karnes, an accountant from Connecticut, had changed into his Marine camouflage outfit and wandered deep into the site. He heard Officer Jimeno calling.

As word spread about the trapped men, Mr. Sereika set out to the center, where he found Mr. Karnes standing alone. Mr. Sereika squeezed his way into the rubble pile, finally spotting Mr. Jimeno's hand.

''He had a good distal pulse,'' Mr. Sereika said. ''I told him we weren't leaving him.'' He pawed at the rubble and found Officer Jimeno's gun, which he passed up to Mr. Karnes. Mr. Sereika then sent word for oxygen and an intravenous set-up. ''Any tool you asked for, it was 20 minutes to get out, and 20 minutes to get back,'' Mr. Sereika recalled.

When Officers Strauss and Paddy McGee arrived, Mr. Sereika passed rocks and rubble back to them. In the distance, they could hear Sergeant McLoughlin calling out for help. ''We had to get Will Jimeno out before we could get to him,'' Mr. Sereika said.

They labored under collapsed walls. It was not unlike working under the dashboard of a car, he said, except the engine was on fire and the car was about to crash. The space was filled with smoke. ''I had Will on 100 percent oxygen,'' Mr. Sereika said. ''Trauma is simple. Fluids and oxygen. We couldn't load and go, we had to extricate first.''

They could hear 4 World Trade Center groaning to its bones. ''I decided my life was not worth more than theirs,'' Mr. Sereika said. Officer Strauss said that at a critical moment, when the jaws-of-life tool could not get a firm grip, Mr. Sereika shimmed rubble into place.

''It's very easy for me to help other people,'' Mr. Sereika said. ''It comes naturally to me and to all paramedics. It's what we do. Taking care of myself, I'm not so good at.''

After four hours, Mr. Jimeno was loaded into a basket. The rescuers were spent, and sent for fresh teams. They hated to leave Sergeant McLoughlin. On the ground, they found they could barely walk. Smoke clogged their pores and reeked from the hair on their heads.

His shirt ripped beyond mending by rebar and jagged concrete, Mr. Sereika headed toward a cousin's home in Greenwich Village, stumbling through the still streets. ''I felt lonely,'' he said.

Articles in this series are reporting on workaday objects that resonate in unusual ways in the aftermath of Sept. 11.